CE NSORSHIP AS
INTEl LECT UAL
TER RORISM: WH ITE
SPOTS IN BLACK
SOUTH AfRICAN
HI STORY, OR THE
WORM INSIDE THE
LIBERAT ION STRUGGlE
OR . NEVILLE
EDWARD
ALEXANDER
OCTO BER 7, 1991
• ••
The second C Walter and Gerda B Mortenson Distinguished Lecture was
delivered on October 7, 1991, by Neville Edward Alexander of Cape Town,
South Africa.
Or. Alexander holds bachelor's and master's degrees in German philology
and history from the University of Cape Town and a Ph.D. in German philology
from the University of Tubingen. He has taught German, history, and sociology
in Cape Town, and has tutored, lectured, and organized projects for the South
African Commitee for Higher Education (SACHED)
From 1963 to 1974 he was incarcerated on Robben Island, where he occu­
pied himself with teaching and other educational tasks, and from 1974 to 1979
he was under house arrest in Lotus River, Cape Town.
Or. Alexander is executive secretary to the Health, Education, and Welfare
Society of South Africa (HEWSSA) Trust in Cape Town and has held various
research and teaching positions in South Africa , Germany, and the United
States Active in numerous community, civic, labor, and political organizations,
he is currently chairperson of the Worker's Organization for Socialist Action
(WOSA) Or. Alexander's publications deal with literature, language policy,
African history, and South African education and politics. His most recent
book is Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in South Africa, a
collection of essays and speeches.
Although Or. Alexander focuses on South Africa in this lecture, his topic
and concerns are applicable far beyond that country. The complex issues he
discusses here are reflected in the interplay between politics and intellectual
freedom everywhere .
Marianna Tax Choldin C Walter and Gerda B. Mortenson Distinguished Professor for International Library Programs INTRODUCTION •
•••
The goal of the C Walter and Gerda B Mortenson Center for International
Library Programs is to foster international tolerance and peace by strengthen­
ing tie s among the world's research libraries and librarians in an efiort to en­
sure access to knowledge throughout the world.
On Ju ly 13, 1991. The New York Times reported that Hitoshi Igarashi, the
Japanese translator of Salman Ru shdie's novel The Satanic Verses, Ilad been
assassinated . Ten days previously, Ettore Capriol o, who had trans lated the
fatefu l work mto Italian, had survived a sim ilar attempt on his life , There was
no dou bt (hat both these events, so distant in space fro m each othe r. were the
direct co nsequence of the death sentence pron ounced on Rushdle for alleg ed
blasp hemy by the Ayatollah Khomeini more than two years ago In a wor ld
where phYSical coercio n has becom e a routme instr ument of political strategy
and tactiCS, these events are no long er extraord inary, An d yet they have a par­
ticular poig nancy sin ce th ey demonstrate in tile most melodramatic manner
possible the direct relatlon S ~l ip betwee n censorsllip as a purported instrument
of liberation 0 11 the one hand and terrorism on the otller.
The se events had another sig nificance for me personally since they closed a
circle that had begun more IIlan three yea rs earlier when I had been invited to
participate in a panel discussion on the subject of shaping South African his­
tory, The panel was one of a series of gala events organ ised by th e publishers
of The Weekly Mail, one of tile most popular alte rnative newspapers in South
Africa at til e time. The events derived the ir significan ce from the fac t that th ey
took place under condition s of intense stale repression , Sin ce I had become
deeply disturbed by a phenomenon that I believed would become a can cer in
our liberation stru ggl e, I decided to add ress the sub ject of the fal sification of
contemporarj' South African history by supposedly liberal and radical socia l
scientists in the country.
Sal man Ru slldle. because of his instant ce lel)rity status resulting from the
uproar that surrounded the publication of his novel, had been asked to be til e
guest of honour at The Weekly Mail Boo k Week, as the festival is kn own. To
everyone's surprise, this invitation to re the entire anti -apartheid activist co m­
munity in South Africa wide apal1. Intimidation, including death threats , was
2
directed at The Weekly Mail staffers, allegedly by Muslim activists A noted
sociologist who was to participate on our panel withdrevv under obvious
duress, but the most significant confrontation took place betwee n two of
South Africa's best-known living English-writing novelists, John Coetzee and
Nadine Gordimer
CENSORSHIP The Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), which was affiliated to the
(Freedom) Charterist UDF, had inVited Rushdie for the occasion . However,
because of the reaction among Muslim militants they felt obliged to disinvite
him and thus to put pressure on The Weekly Maillo accept their position . This
led to a polemical encounter between Gordimer (of COSAW) and Coetzee on a
panel that met in Cape Town's Baxter Theatre on 2 November 1988. Coetzee
charged that the organisers had caved in to the narrow-minded , totalitarian
dictates of the Muslim fundamentalists and explained that in effect, this meant
abdicating from the writers' right to practise their craft since fundamentalism
believed that there was only ONE BOOK. All other books could be no more
than glosses on the revealed TRUTH contained in that book. Gordimer coun­
tered hotly that this was not the principle at issue , that reality required a more
flexible attitude. What was at stake was no less than Rushdie's life itse lf. It was
in order not to put him at risk that COSAW reluctantly took the decision to
di sinvite him Coetzee's laconic reply was that COSAW shou ld perhaps have left
the decision about coming to South Africa to the persecuted author him se lf.
Censorship is defined variously, but the essence is captured in the formula­
tion of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee
adopted in 1984: the removal of material from open access by government
authority (cited in Marsh 19911 ).Viewed in this sense, censorship has been
written about in thousands of works in most countries of the wo rld. South
Africa is itse lf one of the most disgraceful examples of state censorship in the
modern world (see LlWO Factsheet on Censorship May 1991) . Its dubious
distinction in thi s regard has been recorded regularly in many journals, among
others in the pages of Index on Censorship and in the newsletter of the Action
Group Against Censorship, which is published in Johannesburg , South Africa.
It is perhaps not irrelevant to draw attention to the fact that the neofascists
both in and outside of the South African government were openly ridiculing the
co ntradictions inside the liberation move ment that had been laid bare by this
ve ry important event. They enjoyed to the full the embarrassment of those who
were constantly and acerbically attacking the ali-embracing censorship of the
apartheid state.
•••
My focu s, however, is elsewhere since I am concerned with censorship by
liberation move ments, i.e., by aspirant governing groups Moreover, because
of the particular occasion of this address, I confine myself to the printed word
even though it is obviously true that "there is no way to separate the censor­
ship of one form of expression from that of any other" (Marsh 1991 xv)
PreCisely because such move ments do not yet have general state power
(sometimes they do in fact control parts of the national territory in liberation
zones) , they tend to opt for what Choldin (198932) calls active as opposed to
the conventional reactive censorship. Whereas the normal reactive censor has
to scrutinise communications in order "to intercept, suppress, or delete
material harmful to his count ry's or organization's interests" (Webster, cited in
Choldin 198932), the active censor "must also translate, edit, amend, and
rewrite the foreign work" An interesting and in structive study of this phenom­
enon as It was practised in Honecker's German Democratic Republic, which
confirms Professor Choldin's findings, appeared recently in the New York
Review of Books (see Darnton 199142-46). If one extends Choldin's definition
from the censorship of foreign works to that of domestically produced wo rk , it
will be seen that one of the most important aspects of active censorship is in
3
fact the deliberate omission of re levant data. This brings the a(,t of censorship
into close proxim ity wi lll its almost identical twin, pro paganda And it will be
important to bear th is fami ly resemblance In Ill ind Si nce , as we shall see.
active censorsllip or historical falsification is usually justified in terms of
warfare and emergency situations.
Undemocratic, repressive reg imes generally justify censorship on Q[() unds
of momlity and th e maintenance of law and order, ie , of the inequality of the
status quo They realise that it is trueIIlat knowledge is power and that books
can become weapons of struggle. Rather than rely on oneof the fu ndamental
principles of democracy, i e , to fi gllt ideas with ideas. tlley resort to brutal
methods of social control. In our area of focus the ultimate brutality is, of
cou rse , the actual burning of books, which. as Heinrich Heine warn ed at the
beginning of the 19th century, is usually the precursor to the burning of people
•
4
The ideal of all such regimes is the attai nment of hegem onic control ove r lhe
entire national population This is the point of intersect ion between totalitarian
sociology and Fre udian psychology (see. e.g .. Ch oldin 1985:2-3) Hegernony
at th is point is manifest In the peculiar fact of self-censorship practi sed by
most people In such societres. an ambience that is captured in the cllilling
wo rd s of Oswald Spengler "One cannot envisage a more terrible satire on
freedom of thougll t than this in the past one was not allowed to think freely'
today one is all owed to, but no-one IS capable of th in king freely anymo re.
(quoted in Juzwenko 1988 10).
RESISTANCE TO CONTROL ••
For the present, howeve r. it is essential to note that in the end . no matter
how long it takes to get there, all ce nsorship is futile. Resistance to censor­
ship, as to other forms of social constraint, is inevitably set up by the counter­
hegemonic aspirati ons of tile oppressed people for wh om. in the winged
words of Friedrich Schi ller, "th ought alone is free" (see Ch old in 19856). For
freedom fighters, inevitably, freed om of th ought and freedom of speech
bec ome indissolubly mixed wit h thE' ,ight to read what one wants to and even
priol to that, with the right to read at all. Th is is one of the fundamental rea­
sons why so many liberation struggles against co lonial domination and in
repressive neocolonial states are associated With large-scale literacy
campaigns conducted with passi onate comm itment by yo uthful activists
5
It IS axiomatic tll at people engaged in a struggle for freedom will seek 10
open up all the closed doors of the state to which they are opposed. A cu rsory
glance at tile political prog rammes of all the organ isati ons involved in the anti­
apartheId movem ent an d in the national liberatio n struggle in South Af ri ca will
verify this statement. Two examp les will suffi ce. Tile New Un ity Move ment.
successor org anisa tion to the No n-European Un ity Movement founded In
1943. demands in Point 8 of its Ten-Point Pro gram me, freedom of speech.
press, meeti ngs. and association and spells out the meaning of th is demand as
follows
This means the abolition of the Internal Security Act an d related laws
di rected specifically against th e oppressec1. ... Arb itrary ban ning of
meetings, persons , literatu re ancl ot ller media must go
Similarly, in Point nO.6 of the Freedom Charter of the African National
Congress alld of other organisations in tile Congress Alliance, it is postulate
that All Shall Enjoy Human RigllIS" and this is understood 10 mean that
[t]he law shall guarantee to all their right to speak, to organise, to
meet together, to publish , to preach , to worship and to educate their
child ren.
SECTA RIANISM AND FUN DAMENTALI SM •••
•
6
Clearl y, the empowerment of the oppressed people through , among other
things, their right to enJoy these freedoms, is inherent in an y liberation
struggl e. On the other hand , su ch movements , precisely becau se they are
directed towards the conquest of power. or at the very least toward s a more
equitable sharing of power al ways move on the narrow ledge that separates
the uphill commitment to democracy and the precipitous slide into sectarian­
ism and even totalitarian funda mentali sm For, in the deceptively simple words
of Robert SPeck (199112), "It is relatively easy to support speech one is in
sympathy with, while much harder to defend speech that strays fmm the
beliefs of main stream soci ety "
In the case of the South African liberation movement, el iiist, self-pmclaimed
vanguard groups have fro m time to time constituted them selves into power­
seeking cliques ti1at 11ave tried through various forms of th ought control to
manipulate the masses Their aim and til e effect of their actions was to
imprison their followers in a parti cular Standort and thus to narrow their angle
of vision in such a way that large and significant aspects of the histor ical and
social landscape would remain invisible to them. This effect is described ve ry
well in an enlightening article on the state of postwar historiography in Poland ,
largely the result of the practices of Communist Pal1y hi storian s
[S]ociety's historical consciou sness has inevitably been filled with
artificial half-truths and often sim ply untruths, about the history of the
last two ce nturies . [A] great number of people have become hi stori­
cally confused, unable even to di stingui sh truth from half-truth 01- a
conformi st compilation from an honest historical monograph . Such
people are easier to manipulate (J uzwenko 198811)
The salient feature to note in this situation is that there is no doubt that the
cliques of hidden persuaders deliberately and systematically falsify the histori­
cal picture since they have ready access to all the sources that could fill in the
blank spaces. The explanation given to me some years ago by the well-known
editor of one of South Africa's most pre stigious English-language daily news­
papers that journalism is an imprecise craft is a reprehensible cop-out behind
which lurks not only a liberal disregard of verifiable truth but, under the cir­
cumstances obtaining in a violently repressive apartheid state , al so a reckless
disregard for human life. On this occasion , I had gone as part of a delegation
of oppositional activists to complain about and to correct the demonstrably
false allegation s made by one of the newspaper's top reporters about certain
black-consciou sness organisations, allegations that were calculated to fan the
flames of catastrophic internecine violence in the black ghettoes around Cape
Town.
It is this deliberate. conscious , ie, avoidable, and systematic prejudicial
selection of data in order to fals ify reality that makes active censorship into an
act of intell ectual terrorism When one con siders that its purpose, unlike
propaganda in time of war, is not primarily to mislead the enemy but to
indoctrinate and bralflwash one's own followers and thus to violate their
persons by deliberately crippling their perception of reality, it is abundantly
obvious why I can state without fear of contradiction that such acts of censor­
ship in a liberation movement are the prelude to unjustifiable acts of physical
terror against anathematised enemies of the people. The phenomenon of
double standard s (J uzwenko 198810), where the individuals who belong to
the charmed circles of such power-hungry elites say one thing in public and
almost the exact opposite in private, undermines all pretence at bona fides It
is like a worm that consumes the intestines of the liberation struggle, and it
augurs ill for the enjoyment of freedom after victory What tend s to happen in
fact is that the revolution devours its own cll ildren
7
8
nletota litaria n ten dency in national liberation movements derives fro m
opport unistic clai ms on the part of nationalist populist elites to be accepted by
all as the sole authenllc representat ives of the people. This fundamentalist
doctrine of sole aut henticity has given ris e to countless massacres in many
different countries and at many different times . The most re cent (1982-90)
at1e mpt to claim authority in SOUlll Africa by groups associ ated with the AN C
and the South African Comm unist Party led to frightful carnage in the town­
ships. It became so terrifying and counterprodu ctive that numerou s attem pts
were made by many different individuals and groups in the broad liberati on
movement to put an end to the terror. the killings, shootings . necklacings.
burnings. stabb ings. and general mayhem Like Goethe's sorce rer's app ren tice,
the of1en frivolous in itiators of this tragic chain of events coul d not find the
formula with which to gain control over the forc es they had so foolishl y
unleashed. Even today, our country conti nues to reap the bitter frUit of such
lack of vi sion. On e of the most eloquen t attacks on this short-sighted insanity,
which is at th e same time a convin cing defence of the freedoms of speeCh,
thought, assembly, and assoc iatio n, was publi she d by tile Natal reg ion of th e
African People's Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUS A), an organi­
sation affiliated to tile New Un ity Movement. Among many other Important
insiahts, it insists lilat those it ca ll s the violators are:
I
{
During the last few years .. . black journalists esti mated that roug hly
60 per cent of what was happening in the co untry did not reach the
press. They indicated they were being subjected to an unofficial fo rm of
censorsh ip, perpetrated by political activists, that was largely
unrecognised and unreported They described the risks Journalists took
if they wrote about sensitive issues, un comfortable issues that many
peo ple be lieved should not be raised in public (SAIRR 1991 V)
••
This little booklet, whic h was published long af1er I had begun thi nki ng
about an d draf1ing this address , is a mine of information on one of the mo st
crucial themes of the struggle of the oppressed people of South Africa. Those
wh o wish to get a con crete picture of the scope of the problem as well as of
the in evitable resistance generated by these liberatory attem pts at thoug ht
control cannot do better than to read it with careful attention . The th ru st of the
pub lication is captured in the passionate cry of one of the Jou rna lists:
[a) small cli que of inte llectuals Wll ich regards itself as the vanguard
and its membe rs as super-r evolutio naries This cli que has fashi oned its
metho ds of wo rking on those used by tllat discred ited dictator, Stalin
(APDU SA 1987:6) .
The write r(s) ot this pamphlet go(es) on to attack the Ilypocrisy rnllerent in
condemning the apartlleid ru lers "for violating these freedoms when those who
condemn do the same to sister organisations' (AP DUSA 1987 11) .
More recentl y. a grou p of journalists ami artists recalled the many di fferent
ways in which th e misguided tacti cs of certain pol itical groups during tile mid­
eigillies in effect mu zzled tile press, includin g paradoxical ly, the alte rn ative
press, which ha d been midwived into bei ng in South Africa by foreig n liberals
and radicals precisely because th e neofascist policies of the apartheid govern­
ments had all but destroyed th e freedom of the press. The Executive Summary
of the booklet in Wll ich their sad story is published opens as follows
(
We do not believe that press ce nsorship is evil only whe n it is
perpetrated by the gove rnment, but also when it is applied by black
organisations We bel ieve any suppression of information is evil whether
it is done by a black government or a white gove rn ment til e more so
when it is done by organ isations wh ich themselves maintain that t1ley
are fighti ng for the libera ti on of our people. Wh at freedom are we talking
ab out if we are going to be told , 'Thi s IS ilo w to thin k' (Mazwai
1991 17)
At the wo rkshop from which this publication is (Ierived, many speakers
pointed out that the active censo rsili p of the left is more severe than the
9
reactive censorship of the apartheid government If one became the victim of
the latter, one was usually hailed as a victim and a martyr not only in one's own
immediate community but by the entire oppressed people and beyond that by
the international community, ever ready to demonstrate solidarity from afar
with the victims of racist oppression On the other hand , when leftist political
organisations acted against a Journalist, nobody knew about it "The govern­
ment was overt, but nobody knew who the censors on the left we re . They were
very many and very dangerous" (SAIRR 1991 :58) .
In 1987, Karen Press noted how voraciously the cultural commissars were
going about their work by putting pressure on cultural projects to refuse to
support in any way those artists who did not pay allegiance to the UDF/ANC.
If they did not carry out these orders, they stood the chance of being declared
enemies of the people. In a footnote she comments as follows
•
10
There is often more than a question of legitimation at stake. Individu­
als and groups who are not endorsed by the UDF have been vulnerable
to physical attack on their property and their lives. While one cannot lay
the responsibility for these attacks at the door of the UDF, its policy of
defining all non-UDF initiatives as products of the enemy (ie , equivalent
to the work of the government and its agents) clearly encourages the
instigators of such attacks to see these initiatives, and their organisers,
as valid targets (Press 1990:40)
TH ECULTURAL DESKS
••
The main instrument of liberatory censorship is ominously named the
Cultural Desk It calls up all tile Kafkaesque nightmares of bureaucratic inflexi­
bility, amoralism, and philistine opportunism that one associates with the
machinery of government. During the mid-late eighties, afew organisations
associated with the (Freedom) Charterist current in South Africa, in particular
the now-dissolved United Democratic Front (UDF), either had a cultural desk or
were somehow tied into the Cultural Desk. The facelessness and vagueness, in
part paradoxically a mask donned as a defensive measure against the censor­
ship and repression of the apartheid state, lent to this institution a certain heroic
and mystifying aura that was calculated to enhance its ex cathedra authority.
By way of explaining the background to the birth of this potential monster, it
should be noted that one of the medium-term strategic objectives of the liber­
ation movement was/is the isolation of the apartheid regime from the interna­
tional community. To this end, sports and cultural boycotts, including academic
boycotts, as well as the cutting off of diplomatic links, economic sanctions, and
arms embargoes have been promoted with more or less success ever since
1959. As a means of applying political pressure via the chokepoints of the
apartheid system , the strategy cannot be faulted All other things remaining
equal, it had eventually to force the government to the negotiation table , if that
was the long-term goal of the struggle- as, indeed, it always was for the ANC
and its allied organisations. The actual dynamic operating in each particular
sphere was, however, obviously different. Thus, e.g., while there was little
difficulty from the pOint of view of the oppressed people in promoting an
almost watertight sports boycott (since people classified white were almost
exclusively the beneficiaries of international sporting contact as a result of
apartheid policy), the same could not be said for the academic boycott and
certain aspects of the cultural boycott.
For this reason, it made eminent sense to institute a consultative mecha­
nism through which foreigners coming in or South Africans going out could
inform themselves if they were sensitive to considerations of whether their
actions would reinforce the apartheid regime or the liberation struggle. The
crucial factor that would determine whether the Cultural Desk would devolve
into a Censorship Board-In-Waiting was whether or not it was going to be
given quasi-legislative powers. An advisory function under circumstances
where, through the very isolation of the regime, little or nothing is knovvn
about the cultural-political landscape , not to say minefield , is clearly legitimate.
A legislative function , on the other hand, Wllich has to enforce a particular set
11
of party-poli tically inspired va lues, is something qualitative ly differe nt. The
freedom of the in dividual artist (c ultural worker) or acade mic to decide for
him/herself cannot be circu mscribed, no matter how convinced the people on
the Cultural Desk might be about the correctness of their Judgment The oppo­
site point of view leads on directly to physical intimidation and eventu ally to
unjustifiable political murd er.
•••
•
12
It was because of the imp ortance of this prin cip le that I was constraine d to
clarify the acceptable democrat ic practices in the questio n of the academic
boycott at the time of the O'Brien Aff ai r at the Un iversity of Cape Town in 1986
The Irish acad emic and internat ional diplomat Ilad been physically intim idated
and harassed by groups of stud ents at UCT essentially becau se he Ilad
insulted th e move ill ent by (tactlessly) referring to the academic boycott as
Micky-Mouse stuff. The students, ho\>vever, justifi ed their actions In terms of
the lofty ideals of til e inte rnational academ ic boycott and Insisted til at O'Brien
would not be allowed to lecture anywhere in South Afri ca unless he apol ogi sed
and got permission to be in the co untry as a lecturer from the progressive
dem ocrati c movem ent, alias the Ch arterist organisations , alias the Cu ltural
Desk. Rather unwisely, the authorities at UCT caved in to student pressure and
gave a mealy-mouthed defenc e of their supine act ion In resp onse to tile
sch izophrenic and often irrel evant disc ussion that ensued, I wrote, among
other thmg s. that
whether or not a particular fore ign (or Soulh African l) academ ic
(sportsperson, cultura l worker, etc.) should be boycotted has to be
decided in the normal course of democratic debate within the liberati on
movement. One person , or organisation , having beco ille aware of tile
imminent or proposed arrival of sorne individual will , as normally hap­
pens , raisethe matter in the relevant forum(s) amJ from there the di s­
cussion will circl e out and one or other relevant gro up in tile li beratory
camp will take up the matter, appeal for support from oHm groups and
so forth. rh is is the democratic way and we must defe nd and protect
this way of doing tllese and other thi ngs in our movement (Alexander
199099)
The te rrible irony in th e situatio n did not escape those of us who were
co ncerned not primarily about powe r but rather about freed om. Th ro ugh the
ill-consid ered, unthougrlt-tllrough ideas and practices of the hid den per­
suaders, inclu ding th ese would-be cu ltural comm issars, which we re further
vu lgarised in the hysterical atmosphere of South Africa's townships in the mid­
eighties, a period of extre mely brutal repression , the liberation move ment was
fast becomi ng a mirror image of th e very forces it was fighting against
In the sphere of education , for exampl e the politically exciting and pedagog­
ically creat ive notion of People's Education, co ined at an impo rtant pop ular
conference on the educati on cris is held at tl18 University of the Witwate rsrand
(Johannesburg) in December 1985, was quickly deval ued and rende red so
narrowly sectarian that il was no different in form and in its political conse­
quences from the Nation al Party's hated concept of Christian Nati onal Educa­
tion It became an hallucinogenic tab let of merely indoctri national val ue , th e
end result of which was til e cessation of all ed ucati on
In this particular case, the role of liberatory or active cens orship was par­
ticularly gross In order to draw a clear dividi ng line between the hegem onic
thrust of Ihe Cha rterist curre nt at tll is time and the immediate past. whic h had
IJeen sha ped largely in the image and likeness of the Black Conscio usness
M ove~e nt , various hamllanded attempts at histo rical gerrymande ri ng were
und enaken to give the impression that the concept of People's Education was
the glittering progeny of an immaculate con ce ption Historical discontinuity
was insinuated into the record through ruthless falsificati on, largely throug h
the simple method of om itting anything tllat wou ld spoi l the impression of
linea r progress within the pa ra meters of CI'larterism from the early fifties In an
address that I deli vered at the University of Natal in August 1988, I attempted
to correct the historical reco rd and condemned in no uncertain te rms the
practices of th ose liberal ancJrad ical academiCSwho con nived at these
lobotomising historiograp hical practices
I bel ieve that the new radical pedag ogy tllat all of us are trying to
understand and to con erel ise has no place for und emocratic and eve n
totalitarian supp ressions and falsifications of the histori cal record of the
important social practi ces with which we Il appen not to be directly
13
concerned. To tolerate this kind of philistinism and intellectual timidity is
to undermine everything that we say we believe in To believe that only
those groups who pay allegiance or genuflect to the NECC are kosher is
to negate a priori everything we say about so-called democracy
(Alexander 199062).
14
In one authoritative or pre stigious history af1er another, the bandwagon of a
triumphalist Charterism was boarded by one well-known historian or social
scientist af1er another. History, as E.H. Carr (1965126) wrote with considerable
acidity, is (re)written from the point of view of the century makers rather than
that of those who were apparently bowled for a duck (I must apologise for not
being able to translate this cricketing metaphor into the language of basebalL)
As a result , the splendid and significant contributions to the history of the
South African liberation strug gle of organisations and groups such as the Non­
European Unity Movement in the forties and fif1ies, the Black Consciousness
Movement in the seventies and eighties, the National Forum in the early mid­
eighties, simply disappeared from the pages of recently written historical
wo rks . This time-serving attitude of tippexing out vitally necessary elements of
our history and thus leaving large white spots in the record of the struggle of
the black people in the hope of ingratiating themselves with their probable new
masters was a particularly disturbing feature of so me liberal and many radical
historians and other social scientists. In a sense, they were anticipating the
intervention of the Cultural Desk by acts of self-censorship through which they
violated their scholarly integrity They consequently produced works in which
South African history was portrayed as the ineluctable Hegelian unfolding of
the Charterist Idea. By doing so , they may well have prostituted their craf1 , but
at least they evaded the humiliations of the author of Township Fever, the play­
wrig ht Mbongeni Ngema, who was forced 'to change sections of his script so
that it would more clearly support the struggle" as a result of "a lot of protest
from the unions and the cultural desk" (Lindberg 199141) These historians,
however, forget that in history, unlike on the cricket field, it is not so easy to
recognise the century makers even when one or another group seems to be
running ahead of all competitors . Mao Tse-Tung, apocryphally no doubt,
refused to say whether he thought the great French Revolu tion of 1789 had
succeeded , on the grounds that it was much too early to tell. In these days of
the disintegration of Soviet Russia, those words have an added poignancy
TH EDEBATE IN SOUT HAFRICA •••
The many details of this process need not be recounted here Suffice it to
say that the process is abundantly obviou s to all of us on the ground and has
been addressed tentatively in a few journalistic and scholarly works to some of
which I have referred here. At present, there is a more subdued but ongoing
debate about the role of culture in South Africa (see, e.g., de Kok and Press
1990). More and more people are questioning the wisdom of conce ptualising
culture as (only) an instrument of struggle. One of South Africa's most
respected literary critics and creative writers has tried to delineate carefully the
relationship between liberatory politics and the arts.
The arts should not be regarded as a mere means to an end- as a
means to manipulate public thought, for example That is one function
they can play. But that function can degenerate inio being a purely
manipulative venture in wh ich even those in the forefront of the struggle
can use art to limit and contain the expressive capacity of the people
For that reason , the manipulative function of art can be a potentially
reactionary one. The need is consciously to accord the arts a structural
function in society ... The function of art in society should outlive the
limits of asserting that we need the arts to mobilize people , as a primary
goal, rather we should say we need the arts because they extend limits
of democratic partiCipation So it should be willl cultural practice in
general (Ndebele 198996)
15
But despite this Il ealtllY, if belate d, do ubt. the simplifying totalitarian dogmas
refuse to be put to rest. How prevalent such esse ntially defensive attitudes are
is abundantly clear from the most recent pronou nceme nts of the Cu ltu ral
Desk According to ANC activist Naled i Nts iki, cultural workers are not only
social leaders but also arbiters of what was and what wasn't prog ressive art.
Commenti ng on the ethos of Ntsiki 's keynote address at the launcll ing of tile
Mass Democratic Moveme nt's national cultural desk, Kaiser Nyatsu mba,
himself a poet. write r, and senior political Jo urnalist on tt18 Jotlannesburg
paper, th e Star, quotes a Weekly Mail colleag ue as foll ows
In the end . . there was the old arrogance Culture belongs to tile
co mmissars. Culture is the baby sister of politics, to be guid ed and
chastised or indulged and petted at the whim of its social elders .. . One
was left with the same old questions about the cultural desk and its
satel lite stru ctures. ser iously an d not merely rhetorically. Which people?
What culture? (Nyatsum ba 199134)
16
Nyatsumba goes on to point out that the views of the Cultural Desk are often
at varia nce with those of otller spokespersons of the ANC and the Charterist
Movement (Nyatsumba 199134-35), and Dawn Li ndberg (199142) be lieves
that th e Desk itself is attempting to correct its ways Th ere is no doubt in my
mind tllat the fou nding of the Library and Information Wo rkers ' Organi satio n
(of South Africa) is a ray of light that may Ilelp powe rfu lly to counteract the
darkness and the gloom in whi ch th e practices of the Desk Ilave enve loped the
moveme nt for liberation. According to its found ing documents, Ll WOS A
beli eves that
everyone Ilas tile right to free dom of opinion an d expression and that
this right includes freedom to hold opi nions without in terfe rence an d to
seek, receive and impart information anci id eas through any media [and
co mmits itself to J ... [t]he selectio n, presentation and di strib ution of
informa tio n to all, without prejudi ce, and to resisting any attempt to
interfere with that objective (LiWO 1990).
If the members of LlWOSA and related organi sations have the courage of
their convictions, we can rest easy since any totalitarian hubris on the part of
Cultural Desks would quickly be identified and counteracted.
THE DILEMMAS OF fR EE DO M
•••
The se all-too-brief comments on what may turn out to be one of the
pivotal que stio ns III afuture South Africa lead me inevitably to some general
questions about the problem of censorship in a society that aspires to free­
dom. All writers on the subject are agreed that a measure of censorship in one
form or another is unavoidable . Those who would use the censorship of books
in order to mould humanity in their own unblemished image and likeness
insist that even in the free st of capitali st democracies, censorship operates
through the free market. They maintain With good reaso n, let it be said, that In
such cases , publishers function as censors, because they desire "nothing more
than to suppress good literature in order to get rich on trash" (Darnton
199146)
However simplistic this view of the problem Illay be, it does point to the
many dilemmas of freedom in this particular sphere . A SOCiety without censor­
ship would have to permit and subsidise the production of all possible litera­
ture. To state the problem is to negate it under the conditions obtaining in most
countries of the world today. Then there is the eXigencies-of-war argument.
The devious practice s of war propaganda and of the dirty tricks departments of
the intelligence services of most countries in our world today are usually
justified on the basis of the principle salus rei publicae suprema lex. By the
simplest of logical extensions, those who fight against tyranny in civil wars
and in struggles for national liberation use the same argument. Is this a va lid
procedure? Should a commitment to the respect for human dignity disarm the
17
principled adversary and thus render that side vulnerable to the superior arms
of the enemy that has no such commitment? One need but pose the question
to realise the depth of our dilemma. And yet there are very clear answers One
of these is that the undermining of the principle of freedom of speech has to
be counteracted at all times as far as is possible No violation of the principle
should be allowed without definite limits on time and space , ie , if actual
ph ysical survival may be jeopardised by the unfettered exercise of the right­
as in warfare. Lenin, after all, is said to have condoned censorship as atem­
porary measure (see Choldin and Friedberg 1989xiii), but clearly, it became a
principle of Soviet government.
•
18
It must be accepted that in the short periods when survival may necessitate
the suspension of the principle for limited purposes, the monitors , ie, cen­
sors, should be obliged by law to err on the side of tolerance. As soon as the
emergency situation has come to an end, the untrammelled exercise of all civic
freedoms has to be restored . Our dilemma is all too obvious. But there is hope
in the thought that a people accustomed to freedom of speech and to democ­
racy, more generally, will not tolerate the curtailment of the se freedoms
beyond what is patently reaso nable 10 times of emergency On the difficult
question of the regulation of public access to materials deemed to be porno­
graphic , Judge Easterbrook made the following courageous statement for the
Seventh Circuit:
REFE RENCES
Alexander, N. 1990 Education and the Struggle for National Liberation in
South Africa Johanneburg Skotaville Publishers.
African People's Democratic Union of South Africa (APDUSA) 1987. "In
Defence of the Freedom of Thought and Conscience." APOUSA Views 19.
Carr, E H. 1965. What Is Histol)l? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books
Choldin, M 1985. A Fence around the Empire Russian Censorship of Western
Ideas under the Tsars Durham Duke University Press.
Choldin, M. and Friedberg, M (eds). 1989. The Red Pencil. Artists, Scholars
and Censors in the USSR Boston Unwin Hyman
Darnton, R 1991. "The good old days." New York Review of Books, May 16,
1991.
de Kok , I. and Press, K. (eds). 1990. Spring Is Rebellious Arguments about
Cultural Freedom by Albie Sachs and Respondents Cape Town Buchu
Books.
Dworkin , R 1991. "Liberty and pornography " New York Review of Books,
August 15, 1991.
Juzwenko , A. 1988. "The right to historical truth." Index on Censorship 9 10-15.
Under the First Amendment , the government must leave to the people
the evaluation of ideas. Bald or subtle, an idea is as powerful as the
audience allows it to be ... (Dworkin 199114- 15)
It is with a sense of genuine irony that I remind you in conclusion that it was
the young Karl Marx who insisted that "[a]s long as censorship exists, all civil
liberties remain illusory."
Lindberg , D 1991 . "Censorship," In Mau-Mauing the Media. New Censorship
for the New South Africa. Johannesburg South African Institute of Race
Relations.
LlWO 1990. Proceedings of the Launch of the Libral)l and Information
Workers ' Organisation (L/WO). Durban , South Africa , 15 July 1990.
LlWO. 1991 . LlWO Factsheet on Censorship, No.1 , May 1991 .
Marsh and Friends 1991 . 50 Ways to Fight Censorship and Important Facts to
Know about the Censors. New York Thunder's Mouth Press.
Mazwai . T 1991 . "The present and future role of the press. " In Mau- Mauing the
Media New Censorship for the New South Africa. Johannesburg: South
African Institute of Race Relations
19
20
The 1991 Mortenson Distringuished Lecture was supported by numerous campus units,
Molusi, C. 1991. "What hope pulitical pluralism in South Africa?" In Mau­
Mauing the Media New Censorship for the Ne w South Africa.
Johannesbu rg South African Institute of Race Relations.
by local libraries . and by the George A. Miller Committee, ' ;hich brings to the campus people
Ndebele, N 1989. "C ulture and politics in South Africa" In Triquarterlv Series
on Criticism and Culture, NO.2. Writers from South Africa (Fourteen
Writers 017 Culture. Politics and Literary Theory and Activity in South
Africa Today). Evanston , III. Triquarterly Books, Northwestern Un iversity
Sponsors
Nyatsumba. K. 1991. 'Whith er black art? The cultu ral desks." In Mau- Mauin9
tile MedlEI New Censors/7Ip for tfle New Soulh Africa. Johan nes burg
South African Institute of Race Relations
The C. Walter and Gerda B. Mortenson Center for International Library Programs
Peck, R 1991. 'lree speech Ta king the risk." Topic no 191.
Africa n Studies Center
Press, K 1990. Towards a Revolutionary ArtistiC Practice in SoUtl7 Africa. Cape
Town Centre for Afri can Studies, University of Cape Town.
Celebration of Our Ethnic and Racial Cultures
South African Institute of Race Re lalions (SAIRR) 1991. Mau-Mauing the
Medm. New Censors/lip for the New Soul/7 Africa. Johannesburg South
Afri ca .
College of Education
Van Niekerk. P 1990. 'Tile silent war over words . The Weekly Mail July 19-July
25 1990 .
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